Tag Archives: Archeology

Black Genesis – Robert Bauval & Thomas Brophy ***

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A long time ago, the archaeological world was turned on its head by Stonehenge Decoded, a book by an astronomer that suggested Stonehenge was a complex astronomical calculator. The archaeologists didn’t seem too pleased at the intervention of an outsider, but they did eventually take on some of the ideas from the book (it seems to be accepted that other of the ideas were taking astronomical alignments too far).

The same thing seems to have happened with some aspects of Robert Bauval’s theories, excellently laid out in the highly readable The Egypt Code. In that book, Bauval put forward astronomical explanations for the positions and alignments of many Egyptian structures (including the great pyramids), and even for special shafts in the structures that allowed for certain sightings to be taken. Once again, the initial reaction was dismissal, but since then the Egyptologists seem to have grudgingly accepted some of the astronomical data, while still leaving some of it out in the cold.

Now Bauval is back with a co-writer, new structures from ancient Egypt, and another theory to wind up the experts. It has to be said straight away that this book doesn’t work nearly so well as its predecessor. It has too much technical detail, the newly discovered structures are a lot less impressive than those covered in the first book, while his underlying theory is difficult to prove.

Bauval introduces us to a miniature stone circle out in the Sahara that seems to date back to a prehistoric period of Egyptian civilization, the precursor of the ancient Egypt we know and love. Assuming the whole thing isn’t a hoax, it’s both fascinating and saddening to see these relics studied – and messed up by a seeming lack of care from the local authorities that end up with one of the most significant stones smashed into two and the whole stone circle removed from its position.

Some of the alignments and links seem very sensible, but there is always a certain danger when discovering alignments. I was reminded of another book by an image Bauval shows of an alignment fitting with a notch in a hill. This was Alfred Watkins’ book The Old Straight Path, which introduced the concept of ley lines. There are, without doubt, some ancient routes and pathways that can now be represented as ley lines, but many of Watkins’ alignments (which often used notches in hills) simply reflect how easy it is to set up alignments when there are so many objects to choose from. It has recently been pointed out that every postcode in the UK can be put into an alignment with at least 3 ancient structures. Alignments are just going to happen sometimes, and it doesn’t necessarily signify an intention.

The underlying theory of Bauval’s book is that the ancient Egyptians were black, or at least had black ancestors. Of course this has to be true, depending on how far you go back – we all have black ancestors, assuming the ‘out of Africa’ theory is correct. But Bauval highlights various pointers that suggest the ancient Egyptians were more directly descended from black African tribes.

All in all, then, an interesting but not hugely readable book that should intrigue anyone with an interest in ancient Egypt, but that leaves a number of questions unanswered.

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Review by Brian Clegg

The Zodiac of Paris – Jed Z. Buchwald and Diane Greco Josefowicz ***

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Many years ago there was a wonderful picture book for adults called Motel of the Mysteries (see at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com). Its premise was that a post-apocalyptic future civilization dug up a 20th century motel and treated it as the Victorians treated Egyptian discoveries (it’s no coincidence that this was the Toot ‘n Come On motel). I can’t remember a lot of it in detail (I lost my copy around the time I left university) but it included a careful interpretation of the religious significance of the strip of paper placed around the toilet seat to show it had been cleaned.

What really came across in that book was how easy it was to apply wild speculation in interpreting archaeological finds. Where this is pretty rare now, The Zodiac of Paris tells of a similar situation happening for real in Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic France, when a number of ‘zodiacs’ from Dendera and elsewhere in Egypt were subjected to the most amazing range of interpretations.

This is a chunky book, and not the easiest read imaginable (I find it odd that one of the authors teaches writing, as this sometimes reads like a dull academic history) – but there is lots of meat in it. The two main themes that I found fascinating were what was going on in France in the Napoleonic era (something that just doesn’t get taught in UK schools), and the attempts by the experts of the period – sometimes big names in science or maths like Fourier – to make sense of the fascinating ‘zodiacs’ discovered in a number of temples.

These zodiacs, particularly the circular one from Dendera pictured on the front of the book, which was hacked from the temple ceiling and taken back to Paris, caused quite an uproar. Part of the problem – and one of the most fascinating parts of the book given modern outbreaks of anti-Darwinism from Creationists – was that the religious authorities were appalled that some savants suggested that the zodiacs could be used to show the age of their construction, from various positions of solstices and the like. Some of the dates calculated were earlier than the date assumed for Noah’s flood (or even creation itself) from Biblical analysis, and this was not popular in some quarters.

After hearing of all sorts of interpretations and even a play based on what the zodiac meant, we still aren’t absolutely certain today just what the zodiacs were intended to be, but the feeling seems to be that they aren’t projections of actual layouts of the sky at a particular date, but rather collections of images of astronomical symbols (they certainly look a jumbled mess to the untutored eye), which give no information at all about dating. Certainly when you read through the arguments put by the scholars of the time, they are often extremely far fetched, requiring huge assumptions about what was meant by the makers of the zodiacs. The interpretation is anything but obvious, not helped by this book, which isn’t at all clear in its explanations of the various astronomical and geometric assumptions being made by the French scholars.

In terms of what it gives you, it’s an excellent and fascinating book, but the way it is written means it’s often quite hard work to get to that information, with far too much unnecessary historical detail alongside insufficient explanation of the science. To be fair, this may well have been the authors’ intent, but it could have been better given the interest in ancient Egyptian astronomical knowledge and the fascinating parallels with modern Creationist arguments against scientific dating.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Bones, Rocks & Stars – Chris Turney ***

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This is the kind of book that some people will find fascinating, and others dull. If your interest in science overlaps with an enjoyment of history (as I admit it does for me) – if, for example, archaeology excites you – this will be a delight. Chris Turney explores “the science of when things happened” – in other words, the use of scientific methods to work out how old something is, or when it occurred. Of course, if history makes you yawn, this is less attractive stuff.

On the whole it works well, giving Turney the opportunity to string together some fascinatingly different quests into history, using all the tools available to the archaeologist and the researcher. After venturing into a whirlwind trip through the background to the calendar (see David Ewing Duncan’s The Calendar for much more detail), Turney takes us through everything from the dating of King Arthur (if he ever existed) and the Turin shroud to the ice ages and the catastrophe that killed off the dinosaurs. Along the way, particularly at the beginning and end of the book, there are also tirades against creationism. This might seem out of place – this isn’t a book on philosophy of science or religion, but Turney has an excellent reason for doing this, as the literal creationists who believe the world was created around 6,000 years ago would deny practically everything he covers in the book.

The reason I can’t go beyond three stars on this one is there is just too much detail on dating techniques. Of course it’s important to understand just how something like radiocarbon dating works, but by the time you’ve got through a dozen techniques – sometimes one after another in the text – it all gets a bit tedious. It might have been better to have cut this down and to have thrown in another chapter instead.

There were also a couple of points of minor irritation. Turney gets at poor old Katy Melua for her 2005 song “Nine Million Bicycles” in which she says “We are 12 billion light years from the edge. That’s a guess. No one can ever say it’s true.” Now apart from the breaking butterflies on the wheel idiocy of attacking song lyrics, Turney gets his attack a little off beam. He comments that “the most recent age estimate for our Universe was reported in 2003, with the start of time at 13.7+/-0.2 billion years ago – all based on the background microwave fluctuations that are a hangover from the big bang; nothing do with a guess…” First he’s confusing age and size. The age of the universe doesn’t tell us how big it is, just how far we can see. (Okay, Melua got the number wrong, but hey.) And, to be honest, most cosmology is little more than informed guess. We don’t even know for certain there was such a thing as a big bang, the ageing is based on very indirect observation and frankly, yes, it is all a guess. A good guess. Our present best guess. But a guess.

Turney also doesn’t necessarily hit the nail on the head with the pyramids, either. He laughs at earlier ideas of what the pyramids were, remarking that “in these more enlightened days” we now know they were built as tombs. Do we really? Although many archaeologists might not be 100% behind Robert Bauval’s full argument (see The Egypt Code), it does seem to be widely accepted that the function of the pyramids was primarily as stellar “mechanisms” rather than the secondary use as tombs. Even so, most of the sections of the book are genuinely fascinating to those who enjoy an academic fact hunt. A really different and stimulating idea for a book.

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Review by Brian Clegg

The Egypt Code – Robert Bauval *****

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When this book dropped onto the doormat, my first inclination was to dump it in the bin labelled “new age garbage.” But I am very glad I didn’t. Robert Bauval came to fame over 10 years ago with the theory that the great pyramids represent the three stars of Orion’s belt, and that shafts in the pyramids align with historical star positions – that the function of these incredible structures was very much as part of a star and sun oriented religion rather than simply as fancy tombs. Now he takes his ideas much further.

One quick consideration – should this book even be on a popular science website? In a word, yes. Although archaeology studies historical subjects, it is itself a science – doubly so here, where both archaeology and astronomy come into play.

I have to confess to a weakness for books of this kind. I have had on my shelves since my late teens two books of absolute rubbish which are nonetheless delightful because they have the same sort of appeal. They are The Old Straight Track by Alfred Watkins, the man who came up with the idea of ley lines, and The Pattern of the Past by Guy Underwood, an exploration of a thesis that ancient monuments in the UK are oriented to underground springs and other sources detectable by dowsing. I don’t accept for a minute either of the premises. Although Watkins thought of ley lines as old pathways, not giving them the mystical surroundings of the modern new age approach, his ideas mostly reflect the inevitable coincidences that will build up when you consider so many points on a map. It would be much stranger if there weren’t alignments of places on a map. And Underwood’s book is based purely on subjective responses, rather than science. Yet both are very appealing.

The reason they are enjoyable is that both books come up with a hidden theory of the past, something that links us with our ancestors, but is testable in the modern day. The Egypt Code has that same attraction. Here is an exploration of an ancient pattern that has been sitting under our noses, but we haven’t seen, with the big advantage over my old books that Bauval has based his theory on proper science and practical observation, not coincidence or something as lacking in rigour as dowsing. It’s exactly the same attraction that something like The Da Vinci Code has (does the similarity of the title surprise anyone?) – ancient secrets uncovered as a sort of large scale puzzle – all the more exciting because this is for real, not Dan Brown’s overblown fictional world.

In The Egypt Code, Bauval takes his original theory and makes it part of an epic concept – that a whole sweeping set of construction is a reflection of the sky on Earth, and that the locations of the various major religious sites reflect the positioning of various celestial events at certain times in history. Although this is reminiscent of Gerald Hawkins’ largely discredit attempt to suggest that Stonehenge was a complex astronomical calculator, not just having the accepted handful of sun and moon alignments, it actually makes a lot more sense than the Stonehenge theory, given the Ancient Egyptian obsession with the sun and the stars. Bauval’s arguments are very convincing.

It was fascinating reading this book shortly after Nancy Abrams and Joel R. Primack’s book The View from the Centre of the Universe with its stress on the importance of having a cosmology as a way to establish your place in the universe. The Ancient Egyptian world that Bauval describes shows just how much a cosmology contribute. The Egyptian cosmology seems strange now, but it served its function at the time as way of incorporating the best “scientific” view into everyday life, and as Bauval points out, this is an interesting lesson for us today.

Bauval may or may not be right, but it certainly would be wrong to dismiss his ideas out of hand. They are practical, scientific views and they explain a lot that is otherwise difficult to understand. Most of all, this book is imbued with the sense of wonder that is essential for good science, plus the intrigue of a good thriller. Everyone is familiar with the pin-ups of the egyptology world – the great pyramids and Sphinx, the temples of Karnak and Abu Simbel and Tutankhamen’s tomb, but The Egypt Code reveals a whole cluster of structures that are less well known, including the totally bizarre tilted observational “bunker” (my words) at Saqqara. It makes it clear that egyptology has been unwise to ignore astronomy as much as it has to date.

Bauval is an outsider – but the best ideas generally do come from outsiders. After all, experts are great at telling us what’s not possible. Outsiders can often make silly mistakes, but they can also stumble upon original ideas that wouldn’t occur to those who are blinkered by accepted wisdom. You may find Bauval’s sometimes rather self-congratulatory style a little irritating, but I would still highly recommend this book.

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Review by Brian Clegg